By Alison Corlett

I was full of anticipation as I drove into the heart of Lansing, taking a small neighborhood road below the on ramp of 496, to my interview with master painter Irving Zane Taran. I was to look for the Premiere Moving Company where I would find Taran’s studio. The sun was setting as I pulled into the drive and saw him standing in the doorway of his self-constructed studio space. He stood there, back lit from the glow of the room, waving me in.

Irv Taran is a professional painter and professor in the Fine Art Progran at Michigan State University. His teaching career spans 37 years and throughout that time he has produced a mountain of work exhibited both nationally and locally.
Taran will exhibit a monumental body of work at Hankins Gallery in East Lansing starting Sunday and continuing through Nov. 17. This show, titled "Heavy Weather," is the latest edition in an on-going series of work called "Earth Surfaces."

Entering a working studio such as his is breathtaking for any artist. The warehouse-style room, complete with a 20-foot garage door, opitimizes the deluxe artist workshop. Every ounce of floor space is covered with small paintings, wood, tools and boxes. Paint is stacked waist high in buckets. Leaning on the walls, from one end of the room to the other, are paintings stacked three or four deep. Some towered over our heads where others measure only a couple of inches across. Some of the paintings visible in the studio date back to 1967; but the work that occupies the center space is new.

Taran originally was a ceramist. But, he said, "I realized I didn't need the ceramics. I just wanted to glaze." Therefore he developed his dragging and pulling paint technique.

Taran considers his work "classic abstraction." He gathers images from high resolution data satellite photographs to develop his paintings. Taran says he studies "weather in real time." Pictures taken over China and Kazakhstan, for example, show how fires, smoke, and rain formations look 10,000- to 40,000 feet above the earth. These satellite images have a silver quality that Taran highlights in his paintings. Just as a classical painter studies an apple or vase of flowers, Taran pours over landscape images and abstracts them creating a powerful dailogue between color and form.

Beyond the subject reference, how Taran applies the paint is amazing. He uses various sizes of homemade squeegies to masterfully drag and pull the small pools of paint across the raw duct canvases. Working on the floor, he pours layer after layer of paint to create incredible depth of color and texture. The speading process allows the top layer of paint to part open forming small holes revealing colors buried beneath the surface. The shapes that emerge resemble glowing craters of the moon. One end of a particular canvas may be 3-inches thick with paint in contrast to the center which is paper thin with color. His unique blend of metallic and matte paint produces an exotic irridescence that changes at every angle.

"Heavy Weather" also will include a fantastic installation piece that Taran describes as "elongated raindrops." These long ovals, ranging from 24- to 48 inches, are painted in the same manner as the square canvases. The primary difference is the groupings of raindrops are staggered, forward and back, separated by heavy wooden dowels.
A re-occuring visual theme in "Earth Surfaces" is the exploration of focus. Together, his technique of paint application and the sheen produced from the metallic paint create color fields that look both in and out of focus.

Local audiences will find Taran’s lastest collection awe-inspiring. Never before has such an extensive body of his work been exhibited in East Lansing. The presence that his paintings command in a room is unmistakable. Don’t miss this show opening Sunday during the Gallery Walk. A special night with the artist will be from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Oct. 18 at Hankins Gallery at 280 M.A.C. in the Marriott Hotel. For more info, call 337-6366.